Hearthstone's Arena Team is Testing a 20% Increase in Spells During Drafting

Hearthstone's Arena Team is Testing a 20% Increase in Spells During Drafting

Hearthstone's Dean Ayala was recently on reddit responding to a thread discussing arena win-rates being higher without the coin. Within this thread, he mentioned a few things we thought were worth bringing up.

  • They are currently testing a 20% increase in the amount of spells you will see during drafts.
  • Another test is changing the card pool over to Standard. It is "A good idea".
  • We will hear more about the upcoming changes in the "nearish" future.

What sort of changes would you like to see to the Arena?

Quote from IksarHS

My Arena Experience (Source)

Winrate with Coin: 53.9%
Winrate without Coin: 71.21%

My thinking (mostly a theory) is that this has to do with decks being so heavily minion based in arena. Traditionally, decks that are more reactionary tend to do better with the coin. Priest, Rogue, Etc. I imagine the reason for this is because they would rather wait and respond to what their opponent does instead of playing minions proactively. The coin does a good job helping those reactive decks respond at the right moment. So in a world where decks are more reactive and the minion to spell ratio is a bit closer together... maybe going 1st vs going 2nd win rate feels less imbalanced than it does now. There are a number of game-to-game quality changes coming for arena, this is one of them.

Have you ever thought about increasing spell occurences in arena picks? I think that would be more fun if the percentage of spells were a little higher.

Right now we're testing at about a 20% increase. We think having spells occur more often and the card pool being standard is a good idea, but the thing we fight a bit is that when you have a smaller card pool and increase the rate of any set of cards....those cards appear quite frequently. I'm fairly certain it's not a good idea for every Mage deck to have 4 Volcanic Potions or every Shaman deck to have 5 Jade Lightnings, but it might be a good idea to increase the rate at which you get spells or the most recent set. In any case, we have a number of changes in test now and hope to announce the final changes in the nearish future.

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